Graduating MPA Students Share Lessons Learned from their Passion Projects
Graduating MPA students presented their Passion Projects to classmates, faculty, and staff on May 13 and May 20. Passion Projects, which have been renamed Applied Policy Projects, are year-long, student team projects undertaken for external clients. The goal is to provide students with an opportunity to gain real-world experience while tackling a policy-relevant topic. The projects vary enormously. So too do the students' experiences.
Corina Ajder, Suluck Lamubol, Ilija Prachkovski, and Lucia Sobekova teamed up on a project for the International Crisis Group. The goal was to provide the client with an outsider's view of the work it has done for the last 20 years. One of the challenges for the team was the number of reports and other publications they had to review. In addition to desk research, team members also conducted interviews in Colombia, Kenya, South Africa, and South Korea. Among their key recommendations to Crisis Group: pay more attention to advocacy; search for new partnerships, especially with local and regional actors; and publish reports in local languages, and in a variety of formats such as op-eds and on social media.
The International Finance Corporation (IFC) team of Evangel Anih, Yoshiki Miyata, and Zhanetta Zhakypova was tasked to come up with a comprehensive tool kit that could be used by extractive industries for impact evaluation. IFC, which provides a range of services to support private sector development in developing countries, wanted a comprehensive study of best practices in evaluating development impact with the focus on community engagement. "Defining the task took the most time," they reported. They also found navigating team dynamics to be a formidable challenge.
Katalin Nemeth, Yana Ropaieva, and Katarina Sladakovic were asked by Human Rights Watch to examine ethnic profiling and discrimination by police in three EU countries. They encountered some obstacles such as working in countries in which they did not speak the language, and a few surprises along the way. They found, for example that some human rights lawyers and other activists – people they thought would be eager to speak with them – were not terribly forthcoming. They were also surprised to find that the situation in Germany and Hungary was quite similar. "In both countries they don't ask questions or collect data because the assumption is that ethnic profiling does not exist," the team reported. In Spain, on the other hand, there are serious efforts under way to address the issue. One of their recommendations to Human Rights Watch is to be less critical of the situation in Spain. "'Blame and shame' might work in Germany, but we think it would be less effective in Spain where people are already engaged with the issue," they said.
A team of three MPA students joined the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association (ZELA) for their capstone project exploring artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) in Zimbabwe from a gender perspective. The ASM sector is growing as it has become a source of income for many who are struggling due to the ongoing economic crisis in the country. While the crisis has affected the entire population, the burden is greatest on women from low-income and female-headed households. Currently, there is no legislation governing artisanal mining, and proposed drafts currently under review by the government are not gender-sensitive. Students Chuah Ee Chia, Ratidzo Primrose Mungwari, and Elmira Nessipbayeva visited Zimbabwe last summer and conducted extensive fieldwork using gender qualitative research methodology, including an ethnographic study and political and institutional research. The findings on differentiated impact of mining on male and female miners informed the team's project deliverables. The team prepared a comprehensive report and a list of tailored recommendations to their client organization.
Urban youth unemployment is a global problem. Rapidly growing urban areas, segregated neighborhoods, congested roadways, and a lack of transport options have led to the social isolation of marginalized communities. Dealing with these issues is especially urgent in South Africa, which has the third highest youth unemployment rate in the world. Many factors contribute to unemployment. The goal of the three-person UN Habitat team (Nuruddin Ahmed, Balint Nemeth, and Shaileshwori Sharma) was to investigate the impact of travel time on unemployment, and to make recommendations for what could be done to lessen this impact. One of the challenges the team faced was finding appropriate data.
Many global industries have factories in Bangladesh because of the low labor costs in the country. The garment industry has an especially large presence in the country accounting for more than 80 percent of the country's exports. There are an estimated five million workers in the Bangladesh garment industry; 70 percent of them are women. Daniel Szugyi, Jonathan Vega Perez, and Aderoju Alao were tasked by a private equity firm to review publicly available information about the garment industry in Bangladesh and provide analytical reports to support its investment strategy. The team documented 115 incidents, 46 fires, 69 deaths, and 1,344 injuries at 140 factories between May 2013 and April 2016. They reported that one of their biggest challenges was accessing the data they needed, and then sorting and organizing it in a consistent and useful way.
Nataliya Novakova and Saman Sardar worked with their client, the European Stability Initiative, to raise awareness and mobilize action to release political prisoners in Azerbaijan. They focused their energies on media outreach, creating discussion platforms (including at CEU), and with alumni networking. Novakova and Sardar explained that CEU alumni are among those who have been imprisoned in Azerbaijan. They were especially pleased with the response to a couple of articles that they wrote for CEU Weekly, and to the appeal they sent to CEU alumni asking for their help to raise awareness about this issue. "We feel that a university like CEU that encourages its students to get involved in civic action has a special responsibility to support its alumni who do this and are then jailed," explained Novakova.
The goal of Marek Balaz, Balint Balazs, Shreya Bhattacharya, and Anna Zagrebelna's student project was to gain a greater understanding and to explain the far right party Jobbik's popularity in Hungary. The primary tool they used to do this was a series of semi-structured interviews with Jobbik voters. They reported that the interviewees were very diverse – in terms of age, educational backgrounds, and socio-economic status. Despite this, there were certain themes that came up repeatedly in their interviews. Although the Jobbik voters they spoke with said they were not religious, they routinely cited the Bible to support their views. They also tended to move very quickly from making logical arguments to explain their position on a particular issue (opposition to refugees, for example) to emotional arguments. The team also found that many Jobbik supporters felt that they were part of a community, and that this feeling helped to explain their support for the party.
There are an estimated 3.8 million "people of concern" including internally displaced people (IDP), refugees, and asylum seekers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). To address this dire situation, the Linkage Project, founded by Andrew Bergman and Toly Rinberg, created a new data-analytics tool that identified duplications in IDP registration lists. They believed that this tool, which they modified from a successful algorithm implemented in a Tanzanian hospital, would make humanitarian aid distributions more efficient. "We quickly discovered though," explained Meiko Boynton, "that the problem their tool addressed (double-counting) was not one of the biggest problems, and more importantly, it wouldn't fix the biggest challenges on the ground in the DRC." She, Ursula Sanchez, and Giang Vu then shifted directions and set out to find out what the significant data-challenges were. They conducted a large literature review, interviewed several aid workers, and sent surveys to 170 organizations. In this way, they identified the three processes surrounding data-challenges for humanitarian aid agencies: data collection, data management, and data sharing. In addition to suggesting ways to address these challenges, the student team also identified other areas and contexts in which their client's tool could be useful. "Data duplication is not the biggest challenge in aid distributions, but it is in other contexts such as election monitoring," they said.
The Greek Forum of Refugees (GFR) team of Zoe Kostitsi-Papastathopoulou, Mariyana Petrova, and Chia-You Kuo worked closely with their client to strengthen its advocacy capacity. They traveled to Greece in February 2015 for meetings with the client. While they were there, they also visited detention centers and met with refugee communities. The team also participated in GFR's "Europe: Protection or Exclusion" event in June 2015; developed, launched, and monitored a successful media campaign (#RefugeesVoice) for GFR; and prepared a report ("How asylum policies and practices impair access to international protection") based on research and refugee testimonials. The team says that there have been other reports, but "ours is the most recent and provides more details than any of the others documenting the problems with the new asylum procedure." The team is also developing a handbook for refugees, the first one in Greece, which will provide critical information about social rights, health care, and employment. The team is enthusiastic about their client and their project, and also proud of what they have achieved. They report though that it wasn't always easy: they had to constantly change and adapt.
"Our project," explained Nvard Loryan, "relied exclusively on desk research." That is only one of the challenges that she and team member David Hughes had to overcome as they worked together on a project for the UN Office of the Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide & Responsibility to Protect to explore the risks of atrocity crimes in the Caucasus Region. The team also had to adjust to the loss of a team member, a change in their faculty advisor, and satisfying their client that wanted deeper analysis than they felt they could deliver relying solely on desk research. Loryan and Hughes used the UN's "Framework of Analysis for Atrocity Crimes: A tool for prevention" that lists 14 risk factors to assess the situation in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Russia. They concluded that the three biggest threats to the region were the return of IS fighters from Syria and Iraq; a decision by any country to move closer to NATO; and the absence of mechanisms or institutions in these countries that would enable them to prevent or halt atrocity crimes.
